One can build a very good predictive model of government agency behavior if one assumes the main purpose of the agency is to maximize its budget and staff count. Yes, many in the organization are there because they support the agency's public mission (e.g. protecting the environment at the EPA), but I can tell you from long experience that preservation of their staff and budget will almost always come ahead of their public mission if push comes to shove.

Despite being a Jerry Pournelle fan, I had never heard his Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but it certainly fits my observations

Iron Law of Bureaucracy

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

One can build a very good predictive model of government agency behavior if one assumes the main purpose of the agency is to maximize its budget and staff count. Yes, many in the organization are there because they support the agency's public mission (e.g. protecting the environment at the EPA), but I can tell you from long experience that preservation of their staff and budget will almost always come ahead of their public mission if push comes to shove.

The way, then, to punish an agency is to take away some staff and budget. Nothing else will get their attention. Unfortunately, in most scandals where an agency proves itself to be incompetent or corrupt or both (e.g. IRS, the VA, more recently with OPM and their data breaches) the tendency is to believe the "fix" involves sending the agency more resources. Certainly the agency and its supporters will scream "lack of resources" as an excuse for any problem.

And that is how nearly every failing government agency is rewarded for their failure, rather than punished. Which is why our agencies fail so much.

Note that organizations in the private world are not immune to similar incentives. A company's marketing staff will work hard to get more people and resources for marketing, and in good times their staff and budget may balloon. The difference is that in the private world, there is competition. Other companies are trying to sell similar products and services. And if the marketing department is screwing up a lot, or those resources spent on it are not being used productively, the company is going to lose sales and thus resources. To survive, massive changes will be made, including likely some deep cuts and large restructurings in marketing.

It is frustrating to work in corporations that seem to lurch from growth periods to cutbacks in an endless cycle. But it beats the alternative where the organization always grows and never is forced to confront the value of how it spends its resources.

I have mentioned a number of times my chicken or the egg arguments with Progressives on the solution to cronyism. Is the problem that government power exists to influence markets, and as long as it exists people will bid to control it? Or is it possible to wield massive make-or-break government power over industry rationally, and only the rank immorality and corrupt speech of corporations stands in the way. The former argues for a reduction in government power, the latter for more regulation of corporations and their ability to participate in the political process.

I believe this is an example in favor of the "power is inherently corrupting" argument. No corporation lobbied for NOx rules on diesel engines. They all fought it tooth and nail. But once these regulations existed, engine makers are all trying to use the laws to gut their competition:

In 1991, the EPA ignored complaints from several makers of non-road engines that rivals were cheating, in order to save fuel, on emissions rules for oxides of nitrous (NOx). Then environmental groups took up the same complaint, whereupon the agency demanded face-saving consent decrees with numerous engine makers, including two Volvo affiliates.

In essence, the engine makers apologized by agreeing in 1999 to accelerate by a single year compliance with a new emissions standard scheduled to take effect in 2006.

Meanwhile, with another NOx standard looming in 2010, Navistar sued the EPA claiming rival engine-makers were seeking to meet the rule with a defective technology. In turn, Navistar’s competitors sued claiming the EPA was unfairly favoring a defective technology pursued by Navistar (these are only the barest highlights of what became a truck-makers’ legal holy war).

While all this was going on, a Navistar joint-venture partner, Caterpillar, complained that 7,262 Volvo stationary engines made in Sweden before 2006 had violated the 1999 consent decree. Now let’s credit Caterpillar with a certain paperwork ingenuity: The Volvo engines were not imported to the U.S. and were made by a Volvo affiliate that wasn’t a party to the consent decree. EPA itself happily certified the engines under its then-current NOx standard, only changing its mind four years later, prodded by a competitor with a clear interest in damaging Volvo’s business.

To complete the parody, a federal district court would later agree that the 1999 consent terms “do not clearly apply” to the engines in question, but upheld an EPA penalty anyway because Volvo otherwise might enjoy a “competitive advantage” against engines to which the consent decree applied.

As a side note, this is from the "oops, nevermind" Emily Litella School of Regulation:

Let it be said that the EPA’s NOx regulation must have done some good for the American people, though how much good is hard to know. The EPA relies on dubious extrapolations to estimate the benefits to public health. What’s more, the agency appears to have stopped publishing estimates of NOx pollution after 2005. Maybe that’s because the EPA’s focus has shifted to climate change, and its NOx regulations actually increase greenhouse emissions by increasing fuel burn.

Perhaps some of you have seen studies knocking about from time to time that attempt to correlate one or another political position with various psychological or mental deficiencies. Probably the most common is "________ (fill in the blank, I have seen this study for both Conservatives and Liberals) have lower IQ or are less educated or more gullible or whatever than their intellectual opponents. Most folks in the mainstream, fortunately, treat this as the unserious biased ad hominem attack that it is -- it should hardly be a surprise that the folks who look the best in all these studies miraculously match the political views of those doing the study.

However, for those of you who don't follow the climate debate, you may not know that there is a cottage industry among the alarmist / warmist community that cranks out studies that say that skeptics are mentally defective in some way. I kid you not. I won't get into it, because those not in the climate debate won't care much and those in the debate have seen this stuff debated to death. But I thought those of you out of the loop might like to see an example.

A guy named Stephan Lewandowsky has released a series of really egregiously-structured studies around the general theme of climate skeptics being susceptible to conspiracy theories, or conspiracy "ideation" as he puts it. He has "proved" this in the past by offering a mix of people on the Left and Right a list of conspiracy theories mainly held by people on the Right (e.g. Obama birth certificate) while leaving out almost any of the common conspiracy theories held by the Left. Then he asks these people which theories they believe, and Surprise! People on the Right, who overlap a lot with skeptics, believe Rightish conspiracy theories more than do people on the Left. So thus climate skeptics are what they are because they are people who are more susceptible than average to conspiracy ideation. Yes, this study is as stupid as it sounds -- actually it is more stupid because he did it via Internet poll advertised mainly on alarmist blogs with no controls for people submitting false flag answers. And like most climate studies, he got some basic statistical calculations wrong.

One known element of conspiratorial thinking is its ‘self-sealing’ quality (Keeley 1999, Bale 2007, Sunstein and Vermeule 2009), whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is re-interpreted as evidencefor that belief. In the case of ‘climategate’, this self-sealing nature ofconspiratorial belief became evident after the scientists in question wereexonerated by nine investigations in two countries (including various parliamentary and government committees in the U.S. and U.K.; see table1), when those exonerations were re-branded as a ‘whitewash.’ This ‘whitewash’ response can be illustrated by U.S. Representative Sensenbrennerʼs published response to the EPAʼs endangerment finding.

This so grossly oversimplifies the issues involved as to be breathtaking. Only the most tightly sealed of echo chambers could possible pass this work on to publication.

In all of the EPA's public relations and political documents, its position is that man-made CO2 is causing ocean acidification (higher levels of atmospheric CO2 causes more CO2 to get dissolved in ocean water which lowers the PH). One can find thousands of examples but here is just one, from their web site. This is a public briefing paper by the EPA on the general topic of ocean acidity. Here is a screenshot of the top of the first page:

Lets read that first bullet point in the purple section labelled "key points". It says

Measurements made over the last few decades have demonstrated that ocean carbon dioxide levels have risen in response to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to an increase in acidity (that is, a decrease in pH) (see Figure 1)

This is a typical man-is-screwing-up-the-climate EPA statement made to affect government opinion. It sounds official. If I were to publicly challenge it, they would likely label me as anti-science.

The enlightening part of our story occurs when the Center for Biological Diversity took the EPA at their fear-mongering word and said, "well, then you should have an endangerment finding on the Pacific Ocean."

The Lawsuit, launched by the Center for Biological Diversity, seeks to impose enhanced clean water act protection upon the Pacific Coast. The suit argues that protection is necessary because, according to the EPA’s own climate narrative, ocean acidification is severely damaging the marine ecosystem.

According to the CBD;

“The CBD points out that the EPA has acknowledged that ocean acidification has killed billions of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest but still would not classify the waters as imperilled.”

The EPA had dozens of references to acidification in its endangerment findings, such as this example: (p. 137)

According to the IPCC, climate change (very high confidence) and ocean acidification (see Box 14.1) due to the direct effects of elevated CO2 concentrations (medium confidence) will impair a wide range of planktonic and other marine organisms that use aragonite to make their shells or skeletons (Fischlin et al., 2007).

So now the EPA is in court and supposedly subject to perjury charges. And wham, their story changes in a flash:

The EPA’s response is that there is insufficient evidence to support an endangerment finding – an apparent contradiction of their own previous climate narrative.

“There were no in situ field studies documenting adverse effects on the health of aquatic life populations in either state,” the EPA’s motion says. “Nor was there any other information documenting effects on indigenous populations of aquatic life in state waters indicating stressors attributable to ocean acidification. The only information available regarding aquatic life in ambient waters under natural conditions was inconclusive.”

The EPA's position is that there is no evidence, but it is a huge problem we should have every confidence exists. If you don't believe me, look at this passage from an EPA 2010 memorandum on the issue. Ignore the gobbledygook in the middle, just read it with the parts I have bolded.

This Memorandum recognizes the seriousness of aquatic life impacts associated with OA [ocean acidification] and describes how States can move forward, where OA information exists, to address OA during the 303(d) 2012 listing cycle using the current 303(d) Integrated Reporting (IR) framework. At the same time, this Memorandum also acknowledges and recognizes that in the case of OA, information is largely absent or limited at this point in time to support the listing of waters for OA in many States.

We are really really sure it is a problem although the science is largely absent.

PS- By the way, no one thinks the ocean will turn to acid. "Acidification" is one of those scare words that work better as PR than science. The ocean is alkaline and will alkaline even under the most catastrophic forecasts. The issue is with its becoming less alkaline.

The figure below is a portion of a screen capture from the “Heat-Related Deaths” section of the EPA’s new “Climate Change Indicators” website. It is labeled “Deaths Classified as ‘Heat-Related’ in the United States, 1979–2010.”

The key is in the footnote, which says

Between 1998 and 1999, the World Health Organization revised the international codes used to classify causes of death. As a result, data from earlier than 1999 cannot easily be compared with data from 1999 and later.

So, in other words, this chart is totally bogus. There is an essentially flat trend up to the 1998 switch in data definition and an essentially flat trend after 1998. There is a step-change upwards in 1998 due to the data redefinition. This makes this chart useless unless your purpose is to fool generally ignorant people that there is an upwards trend, and then it is very useful. It is not, however, good science.

Other examples of this step change in a metric occurring at a data redefinition or change in measurement technique can be found in

Congress has ceded far, far too much legislative power to Administration agencies like the EPA. The only check that exists for that power is process -- regulators have to go through fairly elaborate and lengthy steps, including several full stops to publish draft rules and collect public comment. A lot of garbage gets through this process, but at least the worst can be halted by a public or Congressional outcry to draft rules.

But like most government officials, regulators resent having any kind of check on their power. Just like police look for ways to conduct searches without warrants, and even the President looks for ways to rule without Congress, the EPA wants to regulate unfettered by public comment process.

The EPA has found a clever and totally scary way around this. In short, they collude with a friendly environmental group which sues the EPA seeking certain rules that the EPA believes to be too controversial to survive the regulatory process. The EPA settles with the friendly group, and a consent decree is issued imposing the new rules, entirely bypassing any rules-making or public comment process. The EPA then pretends that they were "forced" into these new rules, and as a kicker, the taxpayer funds the whole thing by making large payoffs to the environmental group who initiated the suit part of the settlement. Larry Bell describes the process:

“Sue and settle “ practices, sometimes referred to as “friendly lawsuits”, are cozy deals through which far-left radical environmental groups file lawsuits against federal agencies wherein court-ordered “consent decrees” are issued based upon a prearranged settlement agreement they collaboratively craft together in advance behind closed doors. Then, rather than allowing the entire process to play out, the agency being sued settles the lawsuit by agreeing to move forward with the requested action both they and the litigants want.

And who pays for this litigation? All-too-often we taxpayers are put on the hook for legal fees of both colluding parties. According to a 2011 GAO report, this amounted to millions of dollars awarded to environmental organizations for EPA litigations between 1995 and 2010. Three “Big Green” groups received 41% of this payback, with Earthjustice accounting for 30 percent ($4,655,425). Two other organizations with histories of lobbying for regulations EPA wants while also receiving agency funding are the American Lung Association (ALA) and the Sierra Club.

In addition, the Department of Justice forked over at least $43 million of our money defending EPA in court between 1998 and 2010. This didn’t include money spent by EPA for their legal costs in connection with those rip-offs because EPA doesn’t keep track of their attorney’s time on a case-by-case basis.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has concluded that Sue and Settle rulemaking is responsible for many of EPA’s “most controversial, economically significant regulations that have plagued the business community for the past few years”. Included are regulations on power plants, refineries, mining operations, cement plants, chemical manufacturers, and a host of other industries. Such consent decree-based rulemaking enables EPA to argue to Congress: “The court made us do it.”

Hardcore Keynesian theory says that even paying someone to dig a hole one day and fill it in the next is stimulative. This has always seemed insane to me -- how could it possibly be a net gain in growth and wealth to shift resources from productive activities to unproductive ones? But in line with this theory, the Keynesians in the Obama Administration have hit on the perfect stimulus:

A cargo train filled with biofuels crossed the border between the US and Canada 24 times between the 15th of June and the 28th of June 2010; not once did it unload its cargo, yet it still earned millions of dollars... The companies “made several million dollars importing and exporting the fuel to exploit a loophole in a U.S. green energy program.” Each time the loaded train crossed the border the cargo earned its owner a certain amount of Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs), which were awarded by the US EPA to “promote and track production and importation of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.”

Quick - in your last fill up, how much did you pay for gas? About how many gallons did you use?

If you are like most people, you can probably come pretty close to this. I paid somewhere just north of $4.00 for about 18 gallons.

OK, second set of questions: On your last electric bill, how much did you pay per KwH? How many KwH did it take to run your dishwasher last night?

Don't know? I don't think you are alone. I don't know the answers to the last questions. Part of the reason is that gas prices are posted on every corner, and we stare at a dial showing us fuel used every time we fill up. There is nothing comparable for electricity -- particularly for an electric car.

I understand some inherent appeals to electric cars. They are fun to drive, kind of quiet and stealthy like KIT from Knight Rider. They are really torquy and have nice acceleration. There is no transmission and gear changing. All cool and awesome reasons to buy an electric car.

However, my sense is that the main appeal of electric cars is that because we don't see the fuel price on the corner, and because we don't stare at a spinning dial as electrons are flowed into the car, we pretend it is not costing us anything to fill up. Out of sight is out of mind. Heck, even experienced car guys who should know better take this attitude. Popular Mechanics editor Jim Meigs wrote to Glenn Reynolds, re: the Volt:

Others might like the notion of going a month or two without filling the tank

This drives me crazy. Of COURSE you are filling the freaking tank. You are just filling the lead-acid (or lithium-ion) one with electrons rather than filling the hollow steel one with hydrocarbon molecules. The only difference is that you don't stand there watching the meter spin. But that should not mean that we pretend we are not filling the car and paying a cost to do so.

The Environmental Protection Agency has slapped a $6.8 million penalty on oil refiners for not blending cellulosic ethanol into gasoline, jet fuel and other products. These dastardly petroleum mongers are being so intransigent because cellulosic ethanol does not exist. It remains a fantasy fuel. The EPA might as well mandate that Exxon hire Leprechauns.

As a screen shot of EPA’s renewable fuels website confirms, so far this year - just as in 2011 - the supply of cellulosic biofuel in gallons totals zero.

“EPA’s decision is arbitrary and capricious. We fail to understand how EPA can maintain a requirement to purchase a type of fuel that simply doesn’t exist,” stated Charles Drevna, president of American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), the Washington-based trade association that represents the oil refining and petrochemicals industries.

I will remind Republicans thought that ethanol is a bipartisan turd, this particular requirement having been signed into law by President Bush.

John Stossel has a great link-filled round up of failed and failing solar and green energy programs funded by the Obama Administration with our money. Check out the extensive list.

Here, for laughs, is Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins rhapsodizing about Obama as the greatest government venture capitalist ever, and using for his prime example ... Solyndra!

I suppose at one point Kleiner Perkins used to take private risks with private money, but it seems to have found out it can make higher returns leveraging its investments with taxpayer money, and then using political influence to mandate business for the companies in which it invests. Thus the hiring of Al Gore, among other moves, to the KP board. Lane, by the way, is Chairman of serial government trough-feeder Fisker automotive, which make admittedly very cool-looking cars that require a lot of taxpayer subsidies.

Certainly Mr. Lane knows something about marketing, including that age-old tactic the "bait and switch." The taxpayer subsidies of Fisker were made on the theory that electric cars were somehow greener than gasoline cars because they use less energy. But looking at the fuel at the power plant it takes to make the electricity that goes into a Fisker Karma, the car gets worse gas mileage than an SUV (only an EPA equivalent MPG standard that breaks the second law of thermodynamics hides this fact). Congratulations Mr. Lane, green subsidies for sub-SUV gas mileage. All those checks KP partners wrote to Obama in the last election certainly got a good return.

I am glad to see that other sites with more influence than I are focusing attention on the electric vehicle mileage fraud. The Green Explored site writes, via Q&O:

The EPA allows plug in vehicle makers to claim an equivalent miles per gallon (MPG) based on the electricity powering the cars motors being 100% efficient. This implies the electric power is generated at the power station with 100% efficiency, is transmitted and distributed through thousands of miles of lines without any loss, is converted from AC to DC without any loss, and the charge discharge efficiency of the batteries on the vehicle is also 100%. Of course the second law of thermodynamics tells us all of these claims are poppycock and that losses of real energy will occur in each step of the supply chain of getting power to the wheels of a vehicle powered with an electric motor.

Finally! For months I have been writing about this and have started to believe I was crazy. I have written two Forbes pieces on it (here and here) and numerous blog posts, but have failed to get much traction on it, despite what appears to be near-fraudulent science. I wrote

the government wants an equivilent MPG standard for electric cars that goes back to the power plant to estimate that amount of fossil fuels must be burned to create the electricity that fills the batteries of an electric car. The EPA’s methodology is flawed because it assumes perfect conversion of the potential energy in fossil fuels to electricity, an assumption that violates the second law of thermodynamics. The Department of Energy has a better methodology that computes electric vehicle equivalent mileage based on real world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes, while also taking into account energy used for refining gasoline for traditional cars. Using this better DOE methodology, we get MPGe’s for electric cars that are barely 1/3 of the EPA figures.

Do you want to know the biggest energy advantage of electric cars? When you fill them with energy, you don't stand there at the pump watching the cost-meter spin, as you do in a gas station. It's not that the energy cost is lower, it's just better hidden (which is why I suggested the Fisker Karma be renamed the Fisker Bastiat, after the French economist who wrote so eloquently about the seen and unseen in economic analysis). It's why, to my knowledge, no electric car maker has ever put any sort of meter on its charging cables.

This article from the Chicago Tribune on fire retardants has everything, from regulations that benefit a small industry group to tort lawyers effectively forcing the propagation of a bad standard to playing the race card and the "for the children" card in policy debates. Here is a bit of history I did not know:

These chemicals are ubiquitous not because federal rules demand it. In fact, scientists at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission have determined that the flame retardants in household furniture aren't effective, and some pose unnecessary health risks.

The chemicals are widely used because of an obscure rule adopted by California regulators in 1975. Back then, a state chemist devised an easy-to-replicate burn test that didn't require manufacturers to set furniture on fire, an expensive proposition.

The test calls for exposing raw foam to a candle-like flame for 12 seconds. The cheapest way to pass the test is to add flame retardants to the foam inside cushions.

But couches aren't made of foam alone. In a real fire, the upholstery fabric, typically not treated with flame retardants, burns first, and the flames grow big enough that they overwhelm even fire-retardant foam, scientists at two federal agencies have found.

Nevertheless, in the decades since that rule went into effect, lawyers have regularly argued that their burn-victim clients would have been spared if only their sofas had been made with California foam. Faced with the specter of these lawsuits — and the logistical challenge of producing separate products just for California — many manufacturers began using flame retardant foam across their product lines.

The "if only the manufacturer had used technology X, little Sarah would not be dead" argument should be very familiar to readers of Walter Olson's blog. Part II of the story argues that the Tobacco industry helped reinforce this story to shift the blame for fires started by cigarettes to the furniture (can't any of this be, you know, the person's fault who dropped burning items onto flammable items?)

It also, by the way, has plenty of elements of environmental panic in it. For example:

"When we're eating organic, we're avoiding very small amounts of pesticides," said Arlene Blum, a California chemist who has fought to limit flame retardants in household products. "Then we sit on our couch that can contain a pound of chemicals that's from the same family as banned pesticides like DDT."

I am open to believing that flame retardant chemicals pose some harm to humans, though one must posit some way for them to get out of the foam and into people for it to be harmful (just existing nearby is not enough). Further, being from the "same family" as another chemical is meaningless, particularly as compared to DDT which was banned for suspected thinning of bird eggs and not for demonstrated harm to humans.

I finally read through all four parts of the story, and its interesting to compare the approaches to science. The authors make a really good case that the science of flame retardants effectiveness is deeply flawed and that lobbying pressure and actions in tort cases have led to their expanded use rather than any particular benefit.

But the authors' scientific standards change wildly when it comes to their own side's science (I write it this way because the authors clearly have a horse in the race here, they want these chemicals banned). I kept waiting for their bombshell study that these chemicals posed a danger, but we never get it. All we get is the typical journalistic scare quotes about trace quantities of these chemicals being found in house dust and in certain animals.

OK, but with improving detection technology, we are constantly finding traces of chemicals at tiny levels we did not know were there before. How much risk do they pose? We never find out. It would be nice to know. I'm convinced I would rather not have this crap in my couch, but there has to be a better standard for legislation than this. Ironically, the whole point of their story is to highlight regulation pushed by small groups based on bad science, and their response is to ... mobilize a group to push different legislation based on bad science. There is a heck of a lot of "OK for me but not for thee" here.

Here is what is really going to happen: After years of being stampeded by tort lawyers into putting these chemicals into furniture as a defense against "you should have..." lawsuits based on bad science, these same furniture makers are now going to be sued by people claiming the chemicals make them sick based on bad science. And yet another industry will find itself in a sued-if-you-do-sued-if-you-don't trap.

The one group never interviewed in all four parts were furniture makers. It would have been fascinating to get an honest interview out of them. I am sure they would say something like "legislatures just need to tell us what they freaking want, chemicals in or out, and then shield us in the courtroom when we follow the law."

Update:The updates to the story are classic. After describing how the race card was abused in what should have been a straight up fight over chemical effectiveness and safety, the authors then pen a story called "Higher Levels of Flame Retardants in Minority Children." It's OK, I guess, to play the race card in a scientific debate if it is for your own side.

I have written several articles (here and here) outlining why the EPA's method of giving electric cars an equivalent or eMPG is outright fraudulent. I calculated for the average driver, for example, that the Nissan Leaf's 99 eMPG was actually closer to 36. Why? Well, in the EPA's methodology, the science-based Obama administration pretends the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not exist. Specifically, they assume perfect conversion of the chemical potential energy in fossil fuels to electricity. They also assume zero transmission losses. To rework the calculation, I actually used a Clinton-era Department of Energy methodology called well to wheels.

So here is something I thought I would never write: It turns out the Union of Concerned Scientists agrees with me. Apparently they have used a similar methodology to rework electric vehicle MPGs based on the fuel mix of the power in different cities, rather than an average national fuel mix as I did it. I am not sure how they did the analysis - did they use average fuel mix or the marginal fuel, and if the marginal fuel did they assume the marginal fuel at night or during the day? For example, certain California cities look good with solar use but that does not do anything for typical night time car charging.

Anyway, the problem is hard and I could quibble with how they did it. But the results are telling - everywhere they looked, even in the hydro-powered Pacific Northwest, the eMPG they got was lower than that of the EPA's. And in many cases much lower.

As I mentioned the other day, I sometimes have this fantasy that we have some sort of libertarian streak in the Arizona Republican party. Â The Goldwater Institute and Jeff Flake give me hope. Â But then the Arizona legislature gets to work and my hopes are dashed.

The legislature had previously outlawed 30 chemicals that could be used to make the "bath salts"-type mixtures, and dropped another eight substances on the bill Governor Jan Brewer signed last month.

As Boca Raton Florida-based attorney Thomas Wright III toldÂ New TimesÂ shortly before Brewer signed the legislation, "To suggest they're putting a ban on bath salts is dumbing down the general public."

Republican state Senator Linda Gray is now explaining this to everyone, as she's proposed a new method to attempt banning "bath salts."

House Bill 2388 is the new hope, which would allow the state's Board of Pharmacy and the Department of Public Safety to ban the sales of chemical substances at their pleasure.

According to a Senate fact sheet, the pharmacy board "must make a formal finding that the chemical composition defined by the Board has a potential for abuse and submit the finding to DPS."

The pharmacy board then has to "consult" with DPS about its proposed rule, and that's that. The board just has to let the governor and the legislature know once a year which chemicals it's decided to ban.

So after all the concern about regulation voiced by Republicans about the EPA, they are giving even more sweeping powers to... the Board of Pharmacy and the Department of Public Safety? Â This should be all the proof you need that the Coke and Pepsi party haveÂ equivalentÂ authoritarian streaks. Â As many other libertarians have observed, the Republicans have a healthy distrust of government, except when it comes to anyone such as the DPS or military that carries a gun, and then they are willing to hand over infinite trust and authority.

In many ways, this law is exactly like theÂ environmentalÂ laws Republicans hate that require detailed analyses of potential harms but no counterveiling analysis of benefits. Â In this case, the Pharmacy board is required to analyze the potential for abuse of chemicals but there is absolutely no language Â requiring any consideration of the benefits of the substance's use or legality. Â By the language of the law, if there is a potential for abuse, it must be banned no matter how otherwise useful the product is or could be.

This country has made great progress in cleaning up its waterways over the last four decades. Conservatives like to pretend it's not true, but there is absolutely nothing wrong from a strong property rights perspective in stopping both public and private actors from dumping their waste in waterways that don't belong to them.

The problem today with the EPA is not the fact that they protect the quality of the commons (e.g. air and water) but that

New detection technologies at the parts per billion resolution have allowed them to identify and obsess over threats that are essentially non-existent

Goals have changed such that many folks use air and water protection as a cover or excuse for their real goal, which is halting development and sabotaging capitalism and property rights

What might surprise Brougham and many other New Yorkers who were appalled by last summer’s sewage discharge is that there’s nothing particularly unusual about it. Almost every big rainstorm causes raw sewage to flow into the city’s rivers. New York is one in a handful of older American cities — Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., are others — that suffer from poor sewer infrastructure leading to Combined Sewer Overflows, or CSOs. New York City has spent $1.6 billion over the last decade trying to curb CSOs, but the problem is so pervasive in the city that no one is sure whether these efforts will make much of a difference.

CSOs occur because the structure of New York City’s sewage system often can’t cope with the volume of sewage flowing through it. Under the city’s streets, thousands of drains, manholes and plumbing systems converge into a few sewage mains. These pipes can handle the 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater that the five boroughs produce on a typical day — about as much water as would be generated by a 350-year-long shower. But whenever the pipes gather more water than usual — such as during a rain- or snowstorm — the pumps at the city’s 14 wastewater treatment plants can’t keep up with the flow. Rather than backing up into streets and homes, untreated sewage systematically bypasses the plants and heads straight into the waterways.*

In this way, 27 to 30 billion gallons of untreated sewage enter New York City waterways each year via hundreds of CSO outfalls, says Phillip Musegaas of Riverkeeper, a New York clean water advocacy group. Musegaas says he finds it especially upsetting that city officials don’t effectively warn the thousands of people like Brougham who use the waterways and could encounter harmful bacteria during overflow events.

I thought this correction was funny:

This story originally read that New York City’s sewage system could “barely” handle the city’s wastewater, an untrue statement. As long as there’s little surplus stormwater entering the system, it’s adequate to handle the flow.

Oh, so everything is OK, as long as it does not rain. Which it does 96 days a year. I am just sure this reporter would say that BP's offshore safety systems were "adequate" if it only spilled oil 96 days of the year.

I often raise the issue of "What is Normal" when discussing climate. The media frequently declares certain weather events as so "abnormal" that they must be due to man-made factors. A great example is the current Texas drought, which is somehow unprecedented and thus caused by CO2 despite the fact that the great dust bowl drought of the 1930's was many times larger in area and years in duration.

The EPA has a new slideshow purporting to aggregate these "abnormalities." While I could spend all year going through each slide, I want to focus on just one.

Now we all know that the EPA is just full of sciency goodness and so everything they say is based on science and not, say, some political agenda. And the statement and the pictures above are absolutely correct, as far as they go. But they are missing a teeny tiny bit of context. Here is a longer history of that same glacier (thanks to the Real Science blog for the pointer, this is a much better map than the one I have used in the past).

The 1948 position is way up at the top. You can see that the melting since 1966, which according to the EPA is an "acceleration," is trivial compared to the melting since 1760. Basically, this glacier has been retreating since at least the end of the little ice age.

Those who want to attribute the recent retreat to CO2 have to explain what drove the glacier to retreat all that way from 1760 to 1960, and why that factor stopped in 1960 at exactly the time Co2 supposedly took over.

Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public employees and thus members of the union, which receives $30 out of the family's monthly Medicaid subsidy. The Michigan Quality Community Care Council (MQC3) deducts union dues on behalf of SEIU.

Michigan Department of Community Health Director Olga Dazzo explained the process in to her members of her staff. "MQC3 basically runs the program for SEIU and passes the union dues from the state to the union," she wrote in an emailobtained by the Mackinac Center. Initiated in 2006 under then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich., the plan reportedly provides the SEIU with $6 million annually in union dues deducted from those Medicaid subsidies.

“We're not even home health care workers. We're just parents taking care of our kids,” Robert Haynes, a retired Detroit police officer, told the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. “Our daughter is 34 and our son is 30. They have cerebral palsy. They are basically like 6-month-olds in adult bodies. They need to be fed and they wear diapers. We could sure use that $30 a month that's being sent to the union.”

This is a microcosm of the typical liberal fail -- a group or agency does initial good work (private unions in the early 2oth century, civil rights groups in the 60's and 70's, the EPA in the early 70's) but refuse to go away and declare victory, instead morphing into self-sustaining parasites whose only concern is their own survival.

I started blogging because I was always frustrated in live arguments that I would remember the killer comment 5 minutes too late, so it is no surprise that I find live TV frustrating. Â Here is how I had hoped the interview would go this morning on Fox. Â In actual execution, I decided not to play the "2nd law of thermodynamics" card on the morning show just after the in-studio visit by a bunch of bijon frise's.

I'm confused, why are we we even talking about miles per gallon in an electric car?

We measure how well traditional cars use fossil fuels with the miles they drive per gallon of gas, or mpg

Of course, we can't measure efficiency the same way in an electric car since they don't use gas directly, though the electricity we use to charge them is mostly produced from fossil fuels.

So the EPA came up with a methodology to show anÂ equivalentÂ MPG for electric cars so their fossil fuel use (way back in the power plant) could be compared to traditional cars

And you think there is a problem with those numbers?

It turns out the EPA uses a flawed methodology that overstates the electric carÂ equivalentÂ MPG, in part because they assume the potential energy in fossil fuels can be converted to electricity in the power plant with perfect efficiency, which doesn't happen in real life and actually violate the second law of thermodynamics

How should they have done it?

During the ClintonÂ administration, the Department of Energy came up with a better methodology which uses real world power plantÂ efficienciesÂ and fuel mixes to determine how much fuel went into charging an electric car.

Using this methodology, the Fisker Karma, even in all-electric mode, gets about 19 mpg equivilent, not 52. Â This means that it uses about the same amount of fossil fuels to drive a mile as does a Ford Explorer SUV -- the only difference is that the fossil fuel use is better hidden.

It was the quickest and shortest column I have ever written on Forbes, so of course it has turned out to be the most read. It has been sitting on top of the Forbes popularity list since about an hour after I wrote it, and currently has 82,000 reads (I am not a Twitter guy but 26,000 tweets seems good).

I wanted to add this clarification to the article:

Most other publications have focused on the 20 mpg the EPA gives the Karma on its backup gasoline engine (example), but my focus is on just how bad the car is even in all electric mode. The calculation in the above article only applies to the car running on electric, and the reduction in MPGe I discuss is from applying the more comprehensive DOE methodology for getting an MPG equivilent, not from some sort of averaging with gasoline mode. Again, see this article if you don’t understand the issue with the EPA methodology.

Press responses from Fisker Automotive highlight the problem here: electric vehicle makers want to pretend that the electricity to charge the car comes from magic sparkle ponies sprinkling pixie dust rather than burning fossil fuels. Take this quote, for example:

a Karma driver with a 40-mile commute who starts each day with a full battery charge will only need to visit the gas station about every 1,000 miles and would use just 9 gallons of gasoline per month.

This is true as far as it goes, but glosses over the fact that someone is still pouring fossil fuels into a tank somewhere to make that electricity. This seems more a car to hide the fact that fossil fuels are being burned than one designed to actually reduce fossil fuel use. Given the marketing pitch here that relies on the unseen vs. the seen, maybe we should rename it the Fisker Bastiat.

“[Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.’”

The irony is that if you grade the equivalent mpg of electric cars by the methodology outlined by Chu's own energy department, the number would be about a third of that. Only by the EPA's flawed methodology do we get equivalent MPG's for electric cars anywhere near 130.

I have written before that peer review is not a guarantee of correctness. Most academics would laugh at that portrayal, yet that is exactly how climate peer review is treated in the media.

A number of years ago, Charles Monnett, flying over the Arctic to do some sort of whale study, saw 3-4 polar bears floating dead in the water. Without either a) retrieving the bear carcasses or b) even getting a picture of them, he wrote up a paper that discussed the siting and hypothesized the bears drowned in a storm and further that more bears would likely drown in the future if global warming melts more Arctic ice in the summer. The findings were the basis for a lot of worry about polar bears, and played a key role in Al Gore's movie. Panic over the dead bears and Monnett's wild hypotheses about them helped fuel calls for declaring the bears endangered, despite all evidence that their populations have actually been increasing over the last few years. Monnett did quite well from the work, parlaying his fame into management of a $50 million study budget, the dream of all academics.

Monnett's study has come back into the news because there has been some kind of investigation of him and his work by the Feds. There has been a lot of speculation among skeptics that the investigation focuses on academic fraud, but I thought that a stretch. As I wrote here

If you read between the lines in the news articles, we really have no idea what is going on. The guy could have falsified his travel expense reports

The likelihood that an Obama Administration agency would be trying to root out academic fraud at all, or that if they did so they would start here, seems absurd to me.

There is no room for fraud because the study was, on its face, facile and useless. The authors basically extrapolated from a single data point. As I tell folks all the time, if you have only one data point, you can draw virtually any trend line you want through it. They had no evidence of what caused the bear deaths or if they were in any way typical or part of a trend — it was all pure speculation and crazy extrapolation. How could there be fraud when there was not any data here in the first place? The fraud was in the media, Al Gore, and ultimately the EPA treating this with any sort of gravitas.

Seriously, you see four floating bear bodies from 1500 feet, once. You don't have any facts about how they died. You only have one data point in time. Where is there room for fraud? It's one freaking useless data point. Here is just a taste of what a joke this study was:

The actual survey Monnett was conducting when he observed the dead bears in 2004 was the migration of bowhead whales. Investigators questioned how he later obtained data for a table listing live and dead polar bear sightings from 1987 to 2004.

“So how could you make the statement that no dead polar bears were observed” during that time period? May asked.

“Because we talked to the people that had flown the flights, and they would remember whether they had seen any dead polar bears,” Monnett said.

They only mystery is how this unbelievably trivial piece of work was published.

Well, now we have a better idea. The reviewers for the article were Lisa Rotterman and Andrew Derocher. Incredibly, it turns out Ms. Rotterman is his wife - yes, some people are more peers than others - and Derocher was awarded a large research contract by Monnett just before he reviewed the article. Wow.

By the way, I think I will be both right and wrong. I was pretty sure any government investigation would be about misuse of funds, and that does seem to be the main thrust here, though I was wrong in that it does seem to touch on academic fraud as well, in particular the idea of giving out grant money as a quid pro quo for a positive review (a practice that skeptics have long sustpected in the climate community).

By the way, both Monnett and his partner Gleason now are claiming that everyone blew their study out of proportion and it wasn't really about global warming. If this is true, they were sure silent about this when they were basking in all kinds of attention and press and grant money. Either of them could have stepped forward and stopped the momentum that built from this article and they did not.

By the way, for those who still want to believe that the EPA is drive by science,

Gleason concedes that the study had a major impact on the controversial listing of the bear as an endangered species because of global warming.

“As a side note, talking about my former supervisor, he actually sent me an e-mail at one point saying, ‘You’re the reason polar bears got listed,’” Gleason said.

One sighting in history of four floating dead polar bears and suddenly our whole fossil fuel economy has to be shut down.